‘Lay the table, John Joe.’
He put a knife and a fork for each of them on the table, and found butter and salt and pepper. His mother cut four pieces of griddle bread and placed them to fry on the pan. ‘I looked in a window one time,’ said the voice of Quigley, ‘and Mrs Sullivan was caressing Sullivan’s legs.’
‘We’re hours late with the tea,’ his mother said. ‘Are you starving, pet?’
‘Ah, I am, definitely.’
‘I have nice fresh eggs for you.’
It was difficult for her sometimes to make ends meet. He knew it was, yet neither of them had ever said anything. When he went to work in the sawmills it would naturally be easier, with a sum each week to add to the pension.
She fried the eggs, two for him and one for herself. He watched her basting them in her expert way, intent upon what she was doing. Her anger was gone, now that he was safely in the kitchen, waiting for the food she cooked. Mr Lynch would have had his tea earlier in the evening, before he went down to Keogh’s. ‘I’m going out for a long walk,’ he probably said to his mother, every evening after he’d wiped the egg from around his mouth.
‘Did he tell you an experience he had in the war?’ his mother asked, placing the plate of rashers, eggs and fried bread in front of him. She poured boiling water into a brown enamel teapot and left it on the range to draw.
‘He told me about a time they were attacked by the Germans,’ John Joe said. ‘Mr Lynch was nearly killed.’
‘She thought he’d never come back.’
‘Oh, he came back all right.’
‘He’s very good to her now.’
When Brother Leahy twisted the short hairs on his neck and asked him what he’d been dreaming about he usually said he’d been working something out in his mind, like a long-division sum. Once he said he’d been trying to translate a sentence into Irish, and another time he’d said he’d been solving a puzzle that had appeared in the Sunday Independent. Recalling Brother Leahy’s face, he ate the fried food. His mother repeated that the eggs were fresh. She poured him a cup of tea.
‘Have you homework to do?’
He shook his head, silently registering that lie, knowing that there was homework to be done, but wishing instead to accompany Quigley to the chip-shop.
‘Then we can listen to the wireless,’ she said.
‘I thought maybe I’d go out for a walk.’
Again the anger appeared in her eyes. Her mouth tightened, she laid down her knife and fork.
‘I thought you’d stop in, John Joe,’ she said, ‘on your birthday.’
‘Ah, well now –’
‘I have a little surprise for you.’
She was telling him lies, he thought, just as he had told her lies. She began to eat again, and he could see in her face a reflection of the busyness that had developed in her mind. What could she find to produce as a surprise? She had given him that morning a green shirt that she knew he’d like because he liked the colour. There was a cake that she’d made, some of which they’d have when they’d eaten what was in front of them now. He knew about this birthday cake because he had watched her decorating it with hundreds and thousands: she couldn’t suddenly say it was a surprise.
‘When I’ve washed the dishes,’ she said, ‘we’ll listen to the wireless and we’ll look at that little thing I have.’
‘All right,’ he said.
He buttered bread and put a little sugar on the butter, which was a mixture he liked. She brought the cake to the table and cut them each a slice. She said she thought the margarine you got nowadays was not as good as margarine in the past. She turned the wireless on. A woman was singing.
‘Try the cake now,’ she said. ‘You’re growing up, John Joe.’
‘Fifteen.’
‘I know, pet.’
Only Quigley told the truth, he thought. Only Quigley was honest and straightforward and said what was in his mind. Other people told Quigley to keep that kind of talk to himself because they knew it was the truth, because they knew they wanted to think the thoughts that Quigley thought. ‘I looked in a window,’ Quigley had said to him when he was nine years old, the first time he had spoken to him, ‘I saw a man and woman without their clothes on.’ Brother Leahy would wish to imagine as Quigley imagined, and as John Joe imagined too. And what did Mr Lynch think about when he walked in gloom with his mother on a Sunday? Did he dream of the medium-sized glory girl he had turned away from because his mother had sent him a Virgin Mary from her dreams? Mr Lynch was not an honest man. It was a lie when he said that shame had kept him from marrying. It was his mother who prevented that, with her dreams of legs on fire and her First Communion statues. Mr Lynch had chosen the easiest course: bachelors might be gloomy on occasion, but they were untroubled men in some respects, just as men who kept away from the glory girls were.
‘Isn’t it nice cake?’
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘This time next year you’ll be in the sawmills.’
‘I will.’
‘It’s good there’s work for you.’
‘Yes.’
They ate the two pieces of cake and then she cleared away the dishes and put them in the sink. He sat on a chair by the range. The men who’d been loitering outside Kelly’s Hotel might have driven over to Clonakilty by now, he thought. They’d be dancing with girls and later they’d go back to their wives and say they’d been somewhere else, playing cards together in Kelly’s maybe. Within the grey cement of the Coliseum the girl who’d been given the box of chocolates would be eating them, and the man who was with her would be wanting to put his hands on her.
Why couldn’t he say to his mother that he’d drunk three bottles of stout in Keogh’s? Why couldn’t he say he could see the naked body of Mrs Taggart? Why hadn’t he said to Mr Lynch that he should tell the truth about what was in his mind, like Quigley told the truth? Mr Lynch spent his life returning to the scenes that obsessed him, to the Belgian woman on the ground and the tarts of Piccadilly Circus. Yet he spoke of them only to fatherless boys, because it was the only excuse for mentioning them that he’d been able to think up.
‘I have this for you,’ she said.
She held towards him an old fountain pen that had belonged to his father, a pen he had seen before. She had taken it from a drawer of the dresser, where it was always kept.
‘I thought you could have it on your fifteenth birthday,’ she said.
He took it from her, a black-and-white pen that hadn’t been filled with ink for thirteen years. In the drawer of the dresser there was a pipe of his father’s, and a tie-pin and a bunch of keys and a pair of bicycle clips. She had washed and dried the dishes, he guessed, racking her mind to think of something she might offer him as the surprise she’d invented. The pen was the most suitable thing; she could hardly offer him the bicycle clips.
‘Wait till I get you the ink,’ she said, ‘and you can try it out.’ From the wireless came the voice of a man advertising household products. ‘Ryan’s Towel Soap’, urged the voice gently. ‘No better cleanser.’
He filled the pen from the bottle of ink she handed him. He sat down at the kitchen table again and tried the nib out on the piece of brown paper that Mrs Keogh had wrapped round the rashers and which his mother had neatly folded away for further use.
‘Isn’t it great it works still?’ she said. ‘It must be a good pen.’
It’s hot in here, he wrote. Wouldn’t you take off your jersey?
‘That’s a funny thing to write,’ his mother said.
‘It came into my head.’
They didn’t like him being with Quigley because they knew what Quigley talked about when he spoke the truth. They were jealous because there was no pretence between Quigley and himself. Even though it was only Quigley who talked, there was an understanding between them: being with Quigley was like being alone.
‘I want you to promise me a thing,’ she said, ‘now that you’re fifteen.’
He put the cap on the
pen and bundled up the paper that had contained the rashers. He opened the top of the range and dropped the paper into it. She would ask him to promise not to hang about with the town’s idiot any more. He was a big boy now, he was big enough to own his father’s fountain pen, and it wasn’t right that he should be going out getting minnows in a jam jar with an elderly affected creature. It would go against his chances in the sawmills.
He listened to her saying what he had anticipated she would say. She went on talking, telling him about his father and the goodness there had been in his father before he fell from the scaffold. She took from the dresser the framed photograph that was so familiar to him and she put it into his hands, telling him to look closely at it. It would have made no difference, he thought, if his father had lived. His father would have been like the others; if ever he’d have dared to mention the nakedness of Mrs Taggart his father would have beaten him with a belt.
‘I am asking you for his sake,’ she said, ‘as much as for my own and for yours, John Joe.’
He didn’t understand what she meant by that, and he didn’t inquire. He would say what she wished to hear him say, and he would keep his promise to her because it would be the easiest thing to do. Quigley wasn’t hard to push away, you could tell him to get away like you’d tell a dog. It was funny that they should think that it would make much difference to him now, at this stage, not having Quigley to listen to.
‘All right,’ he said.
‘You’re a good boy, John Joe. Do you like the pen?’
‘It’s a lovely pen.’
‘You might write better with that one.’
She turned up the volume of the wireless and together they sat by the range, listening to the music. To live in a shed like Quigley did would not be too bad: to have his food carried down through a garden by a niece, to go about the town in that special way, alone with his thoughts. Quigley did not have to pretend to the niece who fed him. He didn’t have to say he’d been for a walk when he’d been drinking in Keogh’s, or that he’d been playing cards with men when he’d been dancing in Clonakilty. Quigley didn’t have to chew tea and keep quiet. Quigley talked; he said the words he wanted to say. Quigley was lucky being how he was.
‘I will go to bed now,’ he said eventually.
They said good-night to one another, and he climbed the stairs to his room. She would rouse him in good time, she called after him. ‘Have a good sleep,’ she said.
He closed the door of his room and looked with affection at his bed, for in the end there was only that. It was a bed that, sagging, held him in its centre and wrapped him warmly. There was ornamental brass-work at the head but not at the foot, and on the web of interlocking wire the hair mattress was thin. John Joe shed his clothes, shedding also the small town and his mother and Mr Lynch and the fact that he, on his fifteenth birthday, had drunk his first stout and had chewed tea. He entered his iron bed and the face of Mr Lynch passed from his mind and the voices of boys telling stories about freshly married couples faded away also. No one said to him now that he must not keep company with a crazed dwarf. In his iron bed, staring into the darkness, he made of the town what he wished to make of it, knowing that he would not be drawn away from his dreams by the tormenting fingers of a Christian Brother. In his iron bed he heard again only the voice of the town’s idiot and then that voice, too, was there no more. He travelled alone, visiting in his way the women of the town, adored and adoring, more alive in his bed than ever he was at the Christian Brothers’ School, or in the grey Coliseum, or in the chip-shop, or Keogh’s public house, or his mother’s kitchen, more alive than ever he would be at the sawmills. In his bed he entered a paradise: it was grand being alone.
Kinkies
‘Look,’ said Mr Belhatchet in the office one Thursday afternoon, ‘want you back in Trilby Mews.’
‘Me, Mr Belhatchet?’
‘Whole stack new designs. Sort them out.’
A year ago, when Eleanor had applied for the position at Sweetawear, he’d walked into Mr Syatt’s office, a young man with a dark bush of hair. She’d been expecting someone much older, about the age of Mr Syatt himself: Mr Belhatchet, a smiling, graceful figure, was in his mid-twenties. ‘Happy to know you,’ he’d said in an American manner but without any trace of an American accent. He’d been sharply dressed, in a dark grey suit that contained both a blue and a white pinstripe. He wore a discreetly jewelled ring on the little finger of his left hand. ‘Mr Belhatchet,’ Mr Syatt had explained, ‘will be your immediate boss. Sweetawear, of which he is in command, is one small part of our whole organization. There is, as well, Lisney and Company, Harraps, Tass and Prady Designs, Swiftway Designs, Dress-U, etcetera, etcetera.’ There was a canteen in the basement, Mr Syatt had added; the Christmas bonus was notably generous. Mr Syatt spoke in a precise, rather old-fashioned manner, punctuating his sentences carefully. ‘Use these?’ Mr Belhatchet had more casually offered, holding out a packet of Greek cigarettes, and she, wearing that day a high-necked blouse frilled with lace, had smilingly replied that she didn’t smoke.
‘All righty, Eleanor?’ pursued Mr Belhatchet a year later, referring to his suggestion that she should help him sort out dress designs in Trilby Mews. ‘Okayie?’
‘Yes, of course, Mr Belhatchet.’
Trilby Mews was where Mr Belhatchet lived. He’d often mentioned it and Eleanor had often imagined it, seeing his flat and the mews itself as being rather glamorous. Occasionally he telephoned from there, saying he was in bed or in the bath. He couldn’t bear a room that did not contain a telephone.
They left the office at a quarter past six, having finished off what work there was. Eleanor was wearing a pale blue suit in tweed so fine that it might have been linen, and a pale blue blouse. Around her neck there was a double row of small cultured pearls. Her shoes, in darker blue, were square-toed, as current fashion decreed.
That evening she was due to attend the night-school where, once a week, she learned Spanish. It wouldn’t matter missing a class because she never had in the past. Several of the other girls missed classes regularly and it never seemed to matter much. They’d be surprised not to see her all the same.
In the taxi Mr Belhatchet lit a Greek cigarette and remarked that he was exhausted. He’d had an exhausting week, she agreed, which was true, because he’d had to fly to Rome in order to look at designs, and then to Germany. In the taxi he said he’d spent all of Tuesday night examining the Italian designs, discussing them with Signor Martelli.
‘Dog’s Head,’ he suddenly ordered the taxi-driver, and the taxi-driver, who appeared to know Mr Belhatchet personally, nodded.
‘Join us, Bill?’ Mr Belhatchet invited as he paid the fare, but the taxi-driver, addressing Mr Belhatchet with equal familiarity, declined to do so on the grounds that the delay would cost him some trade.
‘Two gin, tonic,’ Mr Belhatchet ordered in the Dog’s Head. ‘Large, Dorrie,’ he said to the plump barmaid. ‘How keeping?’
The barmaid smiled at Eleanor even though the bar was full and she was busy. She was keeping well, she told Mr Belhatchet, whom she addressed, as the taxi-driver had, as Andy.
A Mr Logan, who taught golf at the night-school, had asked Eleanor to have a drink a few times and he’d taken her to a place that wasn’t unlike the Dog’s Head. She’d quite liked Mr Logan at first, even though he was nearly thirty years older than she was. On the third occasion he’d held her hand as they sat in a corner of a lounge bar, stroking the back of it. He’d confessed then that he was married – to a woman who’d once dropped, deliberately, a seven-pound weight on his foot. He wanted to leave her, he said, and had then suggested that Eleanor might like to accompany him to Bury St Edmunds the following Saturday. They could stay in a hotel called the Queen’s Arms, he suggested, which he’d often stayed in before and which was comfortable and quiet, with excellent food. Eleanor declined, and had since only seen Mr Logan hurrying through the corridors of the night-school. He hadn’t invited her to have another
drink with him.
Mr Belhatchet consumed his gin and tonic very quickly. He spoke to a few people in the bar and at one point, while speaking to a man with a moustache, he put his arm round Eleanor’s shoulders and said that Eleanor was his secretary. He didn’t introduce her to any of the others, and he didn’t reveal her name to the man with the moustache.
‘Feel better,’ he said when he’d finished his drink. He looked at hers and she drank the remainder of it as quickly as she could, finding it difficult because the ice made her teeth cold. She wanted to say to Mr Belhatchet that she was just an ordinary girl – in case, later on, there should be any misunderstanding. But although she formed a sentence to that effect and commenced to utter it, Mr Belhatchet didn’t appear to be interested.
‘I just thought–’ she said, smiling.
‘You’re fantastic,’ said Mr Belhatchet.
They walked to Trilby Mews, Mr Belhatchet addressing familiarly a newsvendor on the way. The flat was much as she had imagined it, a small, luxuriously furnished apartment with green blinds half drawn against the glare of the evening sun. The sitting-room was full of small pieces of Victorian furniture and there was a large sofa in purple velvet, fashionably buttoned. The walls were covered with framed pictures, but in the green gloom Eleanor couldn’t see what any of them were of.
‘Want loo?’ suggested Mr Belhatchet, leading her down a short passage, the walls of which also bore framed pictures that couldn’t be properly seen. ‘’Nother drink,’ he said, opening the lavatory door and ushering her into it. She said she’d better not have another drink, not really if she was to keep a clear head. She laughed while she spoke, realizing that her head was far from clear already. ‘Fix you one,’ said Mr Belhatchet, closing the door on her.
The Collected Stories Page 37